Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

From several conversations I had, during this excursion, with young women in these Catholic cantons, I came to think that they are not so keen and hard as, more gentle, artless, and pleasant to talk with than—to make the comparison as personal as possible—they would have been, had they been brought up under a different system. They seemed to wish to be friendly, and not to be afraid of being so; and not to have des arrière-pensées, nor to suspect other people of having them; and to be taking life as it came, as if it were not they who were responsible for what it brought. This may be a mere fancy of my own; but, because I think it something more, I set it down here.

What is the intellectual life of the peasants of Am Stag? If even in a broad country-side, where a bookseller can live, and the world is not quite unknown, the one subject of conversation that interests all, and alone never flags, is one’s neighbours, and their affairs; and if, even in its larger atmosphere, petty jealousies and heart-burnings abound; and often grow, for the soil and atmosphere have some qualities that stimulate such growths, to not insignificant dimensions, from beginnings no bigger than, and as unsubstantial as, the midge’s wing; what, in these matters, must be the state of this little community, when imprisoned for the winter in its mountain cage? How A. manages, now that he no longer has a cow; or how B. managed to get one, are fruitful topics, that will not be dropped till next summer. That C. has, or is supposed to have, beaten her cat, that D.’s hen is reported to have laid an egg, will not be without interest, though the former particular, however long and sedulously nursed, may never get beyond the stage of inference. This, however, will not unfit it for many improvements; which, perhaps, the intervention of the Priest, in his capacity of moral policeman, may sometimes prevent being carried too far. For, though his authority may not now be always quite unquestioned, he still wields a machinery which, under the circumstances of the valley, leaves him master of the situation.

As to A.’s not having any longer a cow to send up to the common pasture—poor fellow! he does not see exactly how this came about. But it is not inexplicable. He is a peasant burger, with a pedigree as old as that of the Hapsburgs. His ancestors, each in his day, to a time back beyond history, had a cow or two to send in the summer. He does what he can; and yet, though still a co-proprietor of the old pastures, just as his ancestors were, he has no cow to send. That is the puzzle. His voice is as potent as that of any of his fellow-burgers in the management of those pastures. He is as much co-owner of them as they. Nothing can divest him of his right in their common use. It is a personal right inherent in his blood. But now he can turn it to no account. He looks on as the rich Innkeeper sends up his dozen, or score of cows, while he has himself none to send. As the herd is driven by, through the village, with bells tinkling, and joyous at the prospect of returning at last to the fresh, thymy, mountain herbage, he looks on in silence, with his mouth open, as if his hopes, and his wits, too, were departing from him, through the passage he is providing for their exit.

He cannot understand how things have come to be as they are. He worked hard all the summer. But, then, he worked for wages: and that is the key to the puzzle. The valley is now advancing into the condition in which, on account of the traffic and business it supports, there will be some who will have to employ others; and many, as population is increasing, who will have no means of living except that of being employed by others. Those who employ others will have cows, some of them many, to send up to the common pastures; some very many more than any had in old times. Of those who are employed by others, many, having necessarily been otherwise occupied, were not able in the foregoing summer to collect food for keeping a cow through last winter, and so this summer, and among these is our poor friend, have not one cow to add to the herd, that is now being collected from the village for their three months’ sojourn on the mountain pastures. These he can no longer turn to account. And he will not emigrate to a new world, where there are openings for his industry and thrift to make him a richer man than anyone in his Canton will ever be; nor will he even leave his Canton for another. And all this for the sake of his long line of burger ancestors, and for the sake of his common rights in the land, which—as far as pasturage go—are of no manner of use to him. It is the sentiments, so lovely and so human, of home, of kindred, of the accustomed locality, of country, that have fastened themselves to, and fed on, the now valueless corporeal hereditament, that bind him to the spot with a chain he has no power to break. The hopes and chances of the distant world do not allure him. For them he will not sell the inheritance, nor leave the graves, of his Fathers.

And as it is, here, with the common pasturage, so is it in some degree with the produce of the common forests. In conformity with immemorial usage, the fuel, and timber for repair of houses, are distributed in proportion to the size of the house. A large house, in which many fires are needed, and which will require more timber for repairs, will receive its proportion. So will also the poor man’s humble tenement. To him this will perhaps give for fuel one klafter, which will not be enough for his wants. But to his rich neighbour, who could well afford to pay for his fuel, it will give four or five klafters. A klafter of wood is a solid measure, six feet long, wide, and high, and three feet deep. This method of distribution, which worked fairly enough under the old condition of things, when none were rich, and none were poor, works unfairly now, when there are opportunities, of which some will be able to avail themselves, for getting rich. A man may now prosper at home in ways unknown formerly; or he may go out into the world, and make several thousand francs, as my Am Stag informant had done, and then come back, and resume his rights, none of which absence forfeits; and he will be rich, and will, therefore, build, and live in, a large house; and this will entitle him to a large proportion of the common fuel and timber. There will, therefore, be so much the less to divide among his poorer fellow-burgers.

August 7.—Had breakfasted at the Croix Blanche, and cleared out of Am Stag, by 6 A.M. I was never in bed after 5. The bottom land having now completely thinned out, you here enter on the ascent of the St. Gothard Pass. Henceforth the road is cut in, or built upon, the mountain side, and frequently changes from side to side of the Reuss.

At the last bridge before you enter Wasen, the Reuss flows below in a channel it has excavated for itself, so deep, dark, and narrow, that you cannot make out where the water is, till you have looked for it. On the left of the bridge, the eastern bank of the torrent is much higher than the opposite side. The place is called the Priest’s Leap—Pfaffensprung. Here Ammer repeated the legend, you will find in the books, of the enamoured Priest, who baffled his pursuers, in the days before the bridge, which were also the days of faith, by leaping across the stream, with the cause of his lapse in his arms. He concluded the story with the comment, that, ‘if the Priest did it, the devil must have helped him;’ then adding, as a comment on his comment, that ‘in these days the Devil has become inattentive to his friends, and does not aid them as he did of yore.’ This legend will help us to understand how it came about, that, in order to promote morality, the people of these Cantons persuaded their priests to keep concubines.

I was at Wasen, seven and a half miles, by 8 o’clock. The road, all the way, was at this time of the morning, in the shadow of the eastern mountains. Yesterday evening at Am Stag, I had debated with myself the question, whether it was better to have, or not to have, an object. I had walked a little way up the Maderaner Thal, under the influence of a growing desire to give up my pre-arranged route—arranged because I had an object—and to take to the mountains. There was before me an inviting opportunity, the charming Maderaner Thal, by which I might find a way to Dissentis. But virtue triumphed. And now that I was at Wasen, and saw a party starting for the Meien Thal, the same question recurred. I had had enough of carriage-road valley-work for the present, and wished for something rougher and harder. Having, however, once entered on the path of virtue, you keep it, if only for the sake of consistency. This was the first time I had ever travelled, when on my own hook, along a prescribed route. In former excursions, I had always left the route throughout, from day to day, an open question. It is very pleasant, so unlike staying quietly at home, to be going you do not at any time know exactly where, and you do not at all care where. An object, which requires a plan, makes this impossible, and substitutes bondage for what the recollection of former excursions tells you would be freedom. An object is not bad, still no object may be better. But I had also another reason for adhering to my pre-arranged plan, which was, that it would bring me to Andermatt, where I was to meet my wife, and the blue boy of last year’s excursion; and some mountain work with them was part of this pre-arranged plan. But still I said to myself this morning, It is all pre-arranged, and that excludes liberty.

Above Wasen the road, having crossed to the eastern side of the valley, passes through a pine forest. The trees are well grown, and the roadside is full of ferns. The Reuss below is unusually noisy. In places the lofty mountains ahead are in sight, and through openings in the forest, occasionally, the mountains on the opposite side of the valley, with here and there on their flanks a little prairie; on some of these a small summer châlet, or hay-grange. As I walked on alone, a little ahead of Ammer, the feeling came over me that I was advancing into one of Nature’s sanctuaries, one of her great laboratories. It was as if I was being admitted to see the anatomy and mechanism of nature, the rocky skeleton, the mountain-ribs of the solid earth. ‘And here too,’ I said to myself, ‘she is busy making the rivers, and’ (as the dinning noise of the Reuss reminded me of the hundreds of glacier-fed rills out of which it was formed) ‘she is making them out of the glaciers; and the glaciers she had made by lifting up the mountains to attract the clouds, the vapour of distant oceans; and then causing its precipitation from their cold and rarefied atmosphere. So is she forming rivers. And these mountain Reusses are grinding down rocks and pebbles, and floating off the vegetable mould, to become the particles of the soil, that is, down below, to form broad green meadows and fruitful golden cornfields. The skittish, noisy stream is young and playful now, and leaps from rock to rock like a young lion. When it has attained to its maturity it will move majestically. Cities will then be built on its banks, and commerce will make a highway of its surface. Up here man has but very slight hold on the scene. In this workshop of Nature her work almost excludes his. He is not the master here. His business and gain here are to understand nature.’ My reverie was suddenly interrupted by the apparition, at the wayside, of a woman on her knees, breaking stones for metalling the road. I could not pass her without a word: even a word would be in some sort a recognition of our common humanity. Poor soul! In a life of 57 years she had seen no more of the wide, rich, busy world than may be seen at Wasen, and a few miles above and below it. Her days were now spent in quarrying pieces of rock above the road, bringing them down to the road, and breaking them in heaps by the roadside. It was with her a good day, a very good one, when she could earn sixty cents. But she was well satisfied with a day that gave her fifty cents, just fivepence. Hard work, and exposure in all kinds of weather, hot and cold, wet and dry, early and late, had scored her face with many wrinkles, long and deep; had enlarged her mouth, and had widened her nostrils, for she had to breathe hard; and by making her eyelids swollen and pendulous, had more than half-buried her eyes. All this had given her somewhat of the features and expression of an ape. I wondered whether in her long solitary days she ever compared her life with that of the gay and prosperous thousands coming and going in carriages, in making a road for whom her life was expended. And I wondered how many of them compared their lot with hers.

On returning the following week, this way, I found her again, at the same place, in the same attitude, engaged in the same work. For a few years longer, perhaps, she will be able to continue it; and then she will have sunk, out of sight of the folk who pass in carriages, to something lower and harder, and will be looking back regretfully to the better times, when between sunrise and sunset, she could earn fivepence.